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31 July 2012

Two Lists

At other places around the internet, there is listing going on. I can't resist a good list. Though neither of these two listing events is one I was invited to join, both made me think, "What would I put on such a list?" (Lists are fiercely contagious.)1. Sight & Sound
Every ten years, starting in 1952, Sight & Sound has polled a bunch of movie reviewers and directors to come up with a list of "10 best films of all time". It's an impossible thing to do, of course, but the results are fascinating (particularly the individual ones — see, for instance, Catherine Breillat, Michael Haneke, Bruce LaBruce, and Laura Mulvey). Rumor has it the poll for 2012 will be announced very soon.

A few critics I follow have released their lists: Roger Ebert, Richard Brody, Steven Shaviro. Perhaps the most interesting approach among the released lists so far is that of Ignatiy Vishnavetsky, who decided to deal with the impossibility of such a list by randomizing it. He wrote over 90 titles on slips of paper, put them in a bowl, and pulled out 10, ranking them in the order he drew them out. "This method," he asserts, "is as good as anyone else's."

This approach appeals to me, and so I followed the procedure Kevin B. Lee suggests in his post about Vishnavetsky's method. I couldn't stop with 90 movies, though, so I made a (still incomplete, as lists always are) list of 150, alphabetized the titles, and numbered them. I then got 10 random numbers from Random.org and matched up the movies to them.

The numbers were 75, 113, 96, 56, 70, 33, 132, 105, 91, 4.

Here's the resulting list, with directors' names in parentheses.

Manhunter (Mann)
Rules of the Game (Renoir)
Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks)
Happy Together (Wong)
Lodger, The (Hitchcock)
Children of Men (Cuarón)
Third Generation, The (Fassbender)
Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki)
Night of the Living Dead (Romero)
After Life (Kore-eda)

Great films, all. I didn't run into a strange random event, such as Vishnavetsky's ending up with three movies from 1981 on his list or Kevin B. Lee's having three Chinese-language movies on his. I'm more surprised by the balance of it: half of the movies on my list are in a language other than English, they cover a range of decades, and they have both the absolute classics (e.g. Rules of the Game) and others more idiosyncratic or personal to my tastes.

There are some narrownesses: the movies are all directed by men and there's only one silent movie. The dominance of male directors on the list replicates the dominance of men on my big list and in the history of filmmaking, alas. The lack of silent movies is not from lack of trying on my part — on the big list, there are three by Fritz Lang alone (M, Metropolis, and Spies; I should probably also have included Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler and Die Nibelungen). But the statistical weight of the talkies won out over chance. So it goes. Nonetheless, I find it exciting as such lists go, and the randomness produced at least as interesting a list as a more deliberate approach would have.

...a list of fifty works that I was prepared to say had influenced my own work. … I dashed my mini-catalog off in a few days as books called out their authors’ names to me, and I could have gone on I don’t know how much further. To my dismay, this list was immediately taken to be a roll call of “best books,” an activity I have no sympathy for, and certainly did not apply in this case, because not all great achievements are influential, or at least not on everybody. So Proust was not there, or Dante or Goethe or Sophocles, either. Awe often effaces every other effect.

The essay is then followed by his fifty titles, with commentary about each (the link there goes to the Google Books version of A Temple of Texts, which won't let you see it all; the complete list, sans Gass's commentary, is available at Goodreads).

I failed at creating this list. I could not get it below 77 titles. Even that was difficult. But after I got down to these 77, taking any one title away felt like a distortion, a disfigurement, a lie. If I took any one title off, I might as well take any other. I wouldn't say this list is even remotely complete, but it's as short as I can make it. I am not a writer so much as an anthology of influences.

I didn't allow myself multiple books by one writer, with two exceptions: Chekhov and Delany. I cut out most books by friends of mine, because that could be a list of 50 all by itself, and I feared offending someone by inadvertently (or advertently) leaving them off. Better to leave them all off, with one exception: China Miéville's Perdido Street Station hit me at just the right time to rearrange my reading and writing life, and so there's no way I could leave it off a list of influences, even though I do know China a bit. (Delany is a friend, but his influence long precedes my meeting him. His own list is at Big Other.)

I was going to try to comment on each title, as Gass had, but time is too short, and anyway, I've got 77. Instead, some general commentary after the list.

Here are the books, alphabetized by author:

Sylvan Barnet, et al. Types of Drama (5th edition)

Donald Barthelme, 60 Stories

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

Samuel Becket, Endgame

Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth

Paul Bowles, A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories

Georg Büchner, Woyzeck

William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine; Nova Express; The Wild Boys: Three Novels

Youth matters a lot for influence. Many of these books are ones I first read before I was 25 years old. Many, in fact, are ones I read in the last couple years of high school and first couple years of college — those seem to have been the prime years for making me into the sort of writer I have, for better or worse, become.

This is a list dominated by white men who write in English. As a white man who writes in English, myself, perhaps that's not surprising or inappropriate. It doesn't really represent my reading life these days, at least not all the time, but it does represent the dominance of white guys writing in English during my high school and college years. One of the reasons I am passionate about adding non-white/non-English-language/non-guys into curricula is that I know the effect of a basically white-Englang-guy curriculum had on me, someone who actually tried, after reading Adrienne Rich's What is Found There, to seek out other sorts of writers. I had a hard time, especially in those pre-internet days, of figuring out where and how to look.

There are a lot of plays, and there could have been more. (Choosing one Shakespeare was especially hard. I've acted in at least 10 of them, and I've taught probably the same number, if not more. It's not that Hamlet is my favorite of his plays — that would be King Lear — but rather that it's the one I've been stumbling around in the longest, and so its phrases and music have so infiltrated me that I end up quoting it sometimes without even realizing it. My high school paperback edition of the play fell apart years ago from use.) A friend once told me I write fiction like a playwright, which is probably true; less so these days than earlier, though, simply because I've been away from the theatre for a while.

Almost everything on the list was published during the last 200 years. That's true to my general reading life. Even more specifically, it's the 20th century that most interests me: its cultures, its histories. Lots of reasons for that, many of them going back to early influences.

These are not necessarily my favorite books by each writer, though many are. For instance, I prefer David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress to Reader's Block, but I remember the exact moment I discovered Reader's Block — it was my senior year of college, fifteen years ago, standing in the University of New Hampshire's library, which at that time was a small collection of books in a cramped little building, because the regular library building was being renovated and expanded. I remember the shelf, I remember the book's placement on the shelf, I remember the quality of the light, I remember what the room smelled like. It was a moment of revelation.

There's a lot more nonfiction that I could have included — this list is of the books that shaped my writing/thinking; a list of books that shaped primarily my ways of thinking would be different. It's a strange distinction, perhaps, and maybe one that only makes sense in my head (Descartes' Error has not particularly affected my sentences, for instance, but I can't imagine this list without it, because it completely changed my way of thinking about thinking, and thus deeply affected some of the slips and turns of perception in, especially, my fiction.) This current list feels more autobiographical than just a list of books that influenced my way of analyzing and responding to the world would, because this list feels like some sort of core, the stuff of guts and bone marrow and DNA. Almost all of these are books I return to with some frequency. They are, in so many ways, the books that give me words.